Senate Democrats Offer a Budget, Then the Amendments Fly

WASHINGTON — And on the 1,448th day without one, the Senate Democrats finally brought forth a budget, and Republicans saw that was good — but first, they made them pay.

After four years of hectoring Democrats to put their political and fiscal priorities to paper, Republicans got their wish on Friday and answered the effort with hundreds of amendments, some politically charged, others just odd, kicking off hours of laborious votes that sent the chamber into a marathon session just before spring recess.

There was the amendment thwarting regulations of greater and Gunnison sage grouse and eliminating funds to monitor the Utah prairie dog. In case a federal court ruling was not enough, Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, wanted to make sure money would be there to prevent the regulation of the size and quantity of food and beverage.

Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, stood vigil against any attempt by the United Nations to register American guns. Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, went one better, demanding that the United States withdraw from the United Nations. Another amendment demanded that President Obama buy his health coverage on the new insurance exchanges being created under the new law. Still another would withhold the pay of the president’s budget director if he was ever late again with a White House budget. It was approved by voice vote, without opposition.

And even if any of those were to be adopted, none of them would have any force of law. “We all know this will come to naught. The House will pass a budget. We’ll pass a budget, and we’ll never agree on it. There’s a lot of folderol about it,” said Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa.

“It’s a charade,” said Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona.

After all the complaints about Democratic irresponsibility on the budget front, what unfolded Friday boiled down to spectacle, hundreds of amendments, all advisory only, and more tailored to the next campaign than to actual governance.

Even the name of the session — the “vote-orama” — belied how seriously senators take the exercise. “Can’t hide from the vote-orama,” trumpeted a statement by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, pretty much showing the whole point of it.

In truth, a Congressional budget accomplishes far less than advertised. It sets top-line limits for the Appropriations Committees to live within as they work on the real, binding spending bills, and it sometimes sets up fast-track procedures to consider changes to tax and entitlement laws. Even those two functions can happen only if the Senate and House can reconcile their budget plans, a long shot this year.

Beyond that, all the details hung onto the document are largely meaningless, ignored by the committees that actually draft legislation.

“Are there political games being played? Yes, there always will be,” said Senator Tom Coburn,  Republican of Oklahoma, who had filed 66 amendments by evening.

Senators signaled widespread frustration on Friday night by adopting a nonbinding amendment, 68-31, to scrap the current budget process and start writing budgets every other year.

Most lawmakers expressed relief that finally, after so many years, the Senate was working on a budget. Its plan stands in stark contrast to the House plan that passed on Thursday. It includes $100 billion for an upfront job-creation and infrastructure program, instructions to expedite an overhaul of the tax code that would raise $975 billion over 10 years and could not be filibustered, and spending cuts and interest savings that total $975 billion, by Democratic calculations, and $646 billion in increases, by Republican accounting.

Even by Democratic estimates, the Senate plan would still leave a deficit of $566 billion in 2023, while adding $5.2 trillion to the federal debt over the next decade. The House plan ostensibly comes to balance that year.

That discrepancy did not dampen the enthusiasm.

“We’re doing our jobs. We’re doing the process,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota. “Our constituents are just so happy we’re moving forward on a budget.”

But such big numbers seemed almost beyond the point Friday, buried in a blizzard of meaningless amendments. The term “vote-orama” officially entered the Senate lexicon in 1977, according to the Senate historian’s office. By 2009, it had become ridiculous enough to prompt a hearing to demand changes. At that time, Democratic and Republican Budget Committee leaders lamented a process that had gone off the rails. In 2006, senators submitted 87 amendments. In 2007, there were 91, in 2008, 113.

This year, there were more than 500.

The main function of the vote-orama is to put senators on record on hot-button issues sure to show up in campaigns next year. Some votes were substantive, if nonbinding. On Friday evening, 62 senators — Republican and Democratic — voted in favor of building the Keystone XL pipeline. Democrats forced Republicans to vote on women’s access to employer-provided contraceptive coverage and to state whether they supported turning Medicare into a program that hands out vouchers for the purchase of private insurance. Republicans put almost all Democrats on the record opposing an amendment to block a carbon tax.

And though advisers to the Republican senatorial committee helped coordinate some of the amendments, the chairman of the campaign committee, Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas, was not at all sure the votes would make a bit of political difference.

“I think voting records matter,” he said. “But I also know the public hears explanations about votes from Republicans and Democrats, and it’s hard to sort out what it really means. In the world of all this political activity and buzz, voters throw up their hands, shake their heads and say: ‘All these people in Washington, D.C., are a bunch of politicians. I don’t know what to believe.’ ”

Jennifer Steinhauer contributed reporting.

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Democrats Aim to Turn Texas Shade of Blue

Republicans like to say they have won 100 of the last 100 statewide races. They are undefeated in those races, dating from 1996.

Sick of it, Democrats are trying to get off the ground. One piece of that effort is Battleground Texas, started by operatives from the Obama campaign to turn Texas into a blue state, or at least a competitive one.

Their opening patter is familiar: start a sustained, well-financed operation in Texas to register more voters, identify Democrats among registered voters and try to get those people to the polls. It’ll take time, they say, and it will be hard.

The organizers have started holding meetings, with two of the first in San Antonio and Austin this week. The Austin event drew more than 200 people, who volunteered their services and ideas, but they were also full of questions.

They asked who would get to take part, whether this group or that one would be embraced by the Battleground organizers, and about the long losing streak.

“Can you post a win in one race in 2014?” said Jeremy Bird, a Chicago organizer for Mr. Obama who is heading the initiative, repeating an audience question for all to hear. “We cannot let it be the benchmark, but we can’t ignore it. Would you tell a friend today to run statewide? Maybe not. We have to create the environment for people to run.”

He reminded the audience that Democrats lost the presidential race in Texas by 16 points — “just now.”

It would be easy to dismiss the whole thing. Big announcements like this come and go. It’s hard to raise enough money. It is tough to keep volunteers engaged over the long haul. Organization is difficult. Texans like the idea of democracy more than they like to participate in it, if the numbers are any indication. Only 43.6 percent of the state’s voting age population turned out for the general election in November. The Republican primary drew just 8.1 percent, and the Democratic primary drew just 3.6 percent. It was possible to win last year’s Republican primary — effectively, the election that counted in statewide races — with only 738,172 votes.

Mr. Bird told the prospects that they didn’t have to win everywhere in the state — just that they had to do better than they do now. Move the numbers in a Republican precinct to 32 percent Democratic from, say, 25 percent. It worked, he told them, in Colorado, Florida and Nevada — red states that came into the blue column in recent elections. He cautioned repeatedly against expecting quick results.

“This is a long battle,” he said. “We don’t win this marathon if we don’t do this first mile.” It’s an enormous state. Somehow, nobody in politics really understands that until they go out and run. Members of the Legislature, members of Congress, mayors and others from the provinces regularly enter statewide races confident in their popularity and political ability. Even those who prevail come back with the same lament: “This is a really, really big state.”

They are not talking about geography, but about scale. Nearly two dozen media markets, 254 counties and the time it takes to organize in so many places.

The Republicans have a leg up. The Democrats used to have it. The voters became acclimated to the Republicans over a long period, starting during the Carter administration, through the 1980 election that turned on “Reagan Democrats,” and through two decades of Texans named Bush at or near the tops of their ballots.

To compete, the Democrats will have to persuade a mob of people to change their habits, to start voting or to vote for their party instead of Republicans. They have to create the possibility in the minds of their own voters that it’s possible for them to win.

If they raise the money and sustain their efforts over several years — if it works the way they hope it will work — then they can tell their friends that the top of the Texas ballot is a reasonably safe place for a Democrat.

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Senate Democrats Finally Take a Stand

It’s been four years since the Democrats who control the Senate produced a budget. That has meant four missed opportunities to demonstrate what they stand for, in hard numbers and clear spending priorities. On Wednesday, the chamber’s leaders stiffened their spines and issued a 2014 budget. If the result isn’t quite a courageous resistance to political winds, it at least makes most of the right choices and is a solid rebuttal to the heartless collection of obsolete dogmas that is the House budget.

For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.

The plan, assembled by Senator Patty Murray of Washington, would raise nearly a $1 trillion in new revenue over a decade by eliminating tax loopholes and breaks that benefit wealthy taxpayers and corporations. It recommends either limiting the overall itemized deductions of the top 2 percent of taxpayers or eliminating individual loopholes like the favorable tax rates given to hedge-fund managers. Corporations would no longer be able to avoid taxation by hiding money overseas.

At the same time, this budget cuts an equal amount of spending, $975 billion, in a way that avoids the reckless damage to vital programs and to the poor in the budget favored by the House. Nearly a third of the reductions come from new efficiencies in Medicare and Medicaid, building on the reforms in the Affordable Care Act. The rest comes from defense cuts after American troops withdraw from Afghanistan, along with cuts to wasteful programs like agriculture supports.

These cuts and revenue increases would replace the arbitrary reductions of the sequester, which does not distinguish between good and bad programs or pay attention to the heavy damage it would inflict on the economy, destroying up to a million jobs.

Ms. Murray’s plan, recognizing that government has to play a role in accelerating the recovery, would devote $100 billion to new job-creating investments: $50 billion for transportation projects, $10 billion for fixing dams and ports, $20 billion for repairing schools and $10 billion for an infrastructure bank for big projects.

The proposal could have gone further. Under pressure from the false Washington “consensus” that the deficit is an immediate problem, the plan fails to spend enough on education or even on President Obama’s proposal for universal preschool. Unlike the budget from the Congressional Progressive Caucus, it does not call for higher tax rates on the rich, or for a bigger estate tax, or for taxing capital gains as ordinary income.

But it rejects the hard-right insistence that the budget must be balanced in the short term, the destructive goal of Paul Ryan’s House version. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted on Friday, Mr. Ryan’s budget gets at least two-thirds of its $5 trillion in nondefense cuts from programs that benefit low- and moderate-income people. While providing the rich with a tax cut, it would cut trillions from Medicaid, food stamps, school lunches, nutrition aid and Pell Grants.

The Senate now needs to make a strong defense of the principles it has, at last, put on paper.

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South Dakota Senator Won’t Run Again

“I will be 68 years old at the end of this term and it’s time for me to say goodbye,” Mr. Johnson said during a brief news conference in Vermillion, S.D. After thanking his family and staff he added: “The Bible says that there is a time for every season under heaven. It is now our season to spend more time with our six grandchildren and in the state we love.”

Mr. Johnson’s decision, coming on the heels of a spate of retirement announcements from Democrats, opens up a potential new opportunity for Republicans in the state that President Obama lost by a large margin last year. Further, the retirement of Mr. Johnson, a moderate who is chairman of the powerful banking committee, will open up that slot, should Democrats maintain a majority. His replacement could be critical as Congress continues to deal with regulatory issues.

Senators Carl Levin of Michigan, Tom Harkin of Iowa, Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey and John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, all Democrats, have said they will not seek re-election. Two Republicans, Senators Saxby Chambliss of Georgia and Mike Johanns of Nebraska, have also said they will not run.

Republicans, who are hoping that 2014 will finally be their year after two opportunities to take back the Senate majority have slipped from their fingers, are eying Mr. Johnson’s seat eagerly.

“South Dakota voters rejected the liberal agenda by nearly 20 points in 2012, and it’s a prime pick-up opportunity for Republicans regardless of whose name ends up on the ballot,” said Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas, who is chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

Former Gov. Mike Rounds, a Republican, had already planned to challenge Mr. Johnson. Another possible contender would be Representative Kristi Noem, who came in on a Republican wave in 2010.

Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, thanked Mr. Johnson for making his decision early enough to allow his party to mount a strong defense of the seat.

Mr. Johnson’s success has been a thing of wonder since almost the beginning of his Senate career. After serving in the House for five terms, Mr. Johnson was elected to the Senate in 1996, winning by two percentage points in an expensive race for the low-cost state.

In 2002 he ran again, beating John Thune (who went on to win a Senate seat in 2004) by a mere 524 votes of more than 330,000 cast, and focused largely on agricultural issues, taking moderate positions along an array of issues.

In 2006, just a month after ascending to new powers with his party’s victory, he suffered a brain hemorrhage from which he struggled to recover, threatening his party’s fragile majority. In 2008 he ran again and won after proving that, with slurred speech and the frequent use of a scooter to ferry him around the Capitol, he could still manage his Senate career.

Among Democrats in South Dakota who could succeed him, the greatest speculation centers on Mr. Johnson’s son Brendan and former Representative Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, who was defeated by Ms. Noem and has kept a relatively low profile since but remains popular in the state.

“I’ve not discussed in detail what comes next, whether it’s Stephanie or Brendan or whatever,” Mr. Johnson said, in response to questions about whom he would like to see succeed him.

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Iraq War’s 10th Anniversary Is Barely Noted in Washington

But on one topic, there was a conspiracy of silence: Republicans and Democrats agreed that they did not really want to talk about the Iraq war.

The 10-year anniversary of the American invasion came and went on Tuesday with barely passing notice in a town once consumed by it. Neither party had much interest in revisiting what succeeded and what failed, who was right and who was wrong. The bipartisan consensus underscored the broader national mood: after 10 years, America seems happy to wash its hands of Iraq.

Never mind that Iraq remains in perilous shape, free of Saddam Hussein and growing economically, but still afflicted by spasms of violence and struggling to move beyond autocratic government. With American troops now gone, the war has receded from the capital conversation and the national consciousness, replaced by worries about spending, taxes, debt and jobs. Whether the United States won or lost, or achieved something messy in between, seems at this point a stale debate.

President Obama, who rose to political heights on the strength of his opposition to the war, made no mention of it in appearances on Tuesday. Instead, he issued a written statement saluting “the courage and resolve” of the 1.5 million Americans who served during eight years in Iraq and honoring the memory of the nearly 4,500 Americans “who made the ultimate sacrifice.”

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who as a Republican senator broke with his party over the war, a move that complicated his recent confirmation hearings, likewise stuck to a written statement praising the troops and urging Americans to “remember these quiet heroes this week.”

Those on the other side of the debates likewise paid little notice. Former President George W. Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney and many other authors of the war made no public comments. Former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld sent a message via Twitter: “10 yrs ago began the long, difficult work of liberating 25 mil Iraqis. All who played a role in history deserve our respect & appreciation.”

Although some foreign policy and news organizations held forums or produced retrospectives in recent days, the floors of Congress did not ring out with speeches expounding on the lessons of Iraq. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, gave a speech about the Middle East without mentioning the anniversary. Speaker John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, was prepared to say something about the anniversary if questioned at a morning news briefing, an aide said — but no one asked.

“This is a little like the crazy uncle in the attic that nobody wants to talk about,” said John Nagl, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who served in Iraq and is now a fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington. “But we need to because we put him there.”

Critics like Mr. Nagl argue that the anniversary should serve as a reminder about what he sees as the mistake of starting the war. “It would be a shame if we did not pause and think hard about this as a nation,” he said. “We paid an enormous price as a nation. The Iraqis have paid a huge price. The region is destabilized.”

Some war supporters disagreed. “President Bush made the right decision on removing the Iraqi regime from power,” said Douglas J. Feith, a former under secretary of defense. Where America went wrong, he said, was “when we transformed ourselves from liberators to occupiers.” Like other war supporters, he expressed concern that Mr. Obama might lose the peace. “The full withdrawal of U.S. forces is risky,” he said.

Meghan O’Sullivan, a former deputy national security adviser to Mr. Bush, said that some lessons could be drawn, but that it was too soon for final judgments. “Many issues that will be key to answering the question of was it worth it still hang in the balance,” she said.

Public attitudes toward the war have hardened 10 years later. Fifty-four percent of Americans interviewed by CBS News in a poll released Tuesday said the United States should have stayed out of Iraq, while 38 percent said it did the right thing. Fifty percent said the United States did not succeed in achieving its objectives, while 41 percent said it did.

The White House found itself in the awkward position of standing by Mr. Obama’s opposition to the war but offering an optimistic prognosis for Iraq — and even giving a grudging nod to Mr. Bush for removing a dictator from power.

“Ridding the world of Saddam Hussein was a welcome development for the world and for Iraq,” Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said at his daily briefing. “The president believes that Iraq has the potential for a better future today because of the remarkable sacrifice and service of American men and women in uniform as well as civilian American men and women who served in Iraq.”

Asked if that better future owed in part to the decision to invade, Mr. Carney said Mr. Hussein was removed by the military sent by Mr. Bush.

“And to the extent that credit is due, credit is due to him for that,” Mr. Carney said. “That does not change, I think, assessments made by this president as a candidate or by many others on this day, 10 years after, about the judgments made to go to war in Iraq.”

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Senate Passes $3.7 Trillion Budget, Setting Up Contentious Negotiations

The 50-to-49 vote in the Senate, which is controlled by Democrats, sets up contentious — and potentially fruitless — negotiations with the Republican-controlled House in April to reconcile two vastly different plans for dealing with the nation’s economic and budgetary problems. No Republicans voted for the Senate plan, and four Democrats opposed it: Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Mark Begich of Alaska and Max Baucus of Montana. All four are from red states and are up for re-election in 2014.

“The Senate has passed a budget,” Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the Senate Budget Committee chairwoman, declared at 4:56 a.m.

The House plan ostensibly brings the government’s taxes and spending into balance by 2023 with cuts to domestic spending even below the levels of automatic across-the-board cuts roiling federal programs now, and it orders up dramatic and controversial changes to Medicare and the tax code.

The Senate plan, by contrast, includes $100 billion in upfront infrastructure spending to bolster the economy and calls for special fast-track rules to overhaul the tax code and raise $975 billion over 10 years in legislation that could not be filibustered. Even with that tax increase and prescribed spending cuts, the Senate plan would leave the government with a $566 billion annual deficit in 10 years, and $5.2 trillion in additional debt over that window.

“The first priority of the Senate budget is creating jobs and economic growth from the middle out, not the top down,” Ms. Murray said. “With an unemployment rate that remains stubbornly high, and a middle class that has seen their wages stagnate for far too long, we simply cannot afford any threats to our fragile recovery.”

Republicans were harshly dismissive of the Democrats’ priorities. “Honest people can disagree on policy, but where there can be no honest disagreement is the need to change our nation’s debt course,” said Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the committee’s ranking Republican. “The singular truth that no one can escape is that the House budget changes our debt course while the Senate budget does not.”

Passage of the competing spending plans does advance a more orderly budget process after nearly three years of crises and brinkmanship. If House and Senate negotiators can agree on a framework for overhauling the tax code and entitlement programs like Medicare, Congress’s committees could go to work on detailed legislation, possibly under special rules that protect the bills from a Senate filibuster.

If the negotiations prove fruitless, the next budget crisis looms this summer when Congress must again raise the government’s statutory borrowing limit or risk defaulting on the federal debt. On Thursday, House Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio revived a rule — breached in January — that any increase in the debt ceiling must be accompanied by equivalent spending cuts.

Final passage of the Senate budget was upstaged by the process that got the senators to it, a marathon session known since 1977 as the budget “vote-a-rama.” More than 500 amendments were filed, and 70 were voted on. Those numbers dwarf previous marathon voting sessions, reflecting pent-up Republican demand for votes and a new, uncompromising view of procedure on the part of Tea Party-backed senators.

The amendments were advisory only, but they put the Senate on record on a dizzying variety of subjects, including limiting the regulation of sage grouse, preventing the United Nations from infringing on Americans’ right to bear arms, repealing a tax on medical devices that helps finance the president’s health care law and building the Keystone XL pipeline.

By 4 a.m., the senators were sitting quietly in their seats, plowing through amendments like sleepy schoolchildren, breaking only to give the Senate pages a standing ovation and to grumble when a senator demanded a roll-call vote if a voice vote would suffice. As the senators recorded their final votes, they hastily left for a two-week spring recess.

But the sleepy bonhomie did not bridge the divide between the parties. Senate Republicans and Democrats could not even agree on what was in the Democratic budget. Ms. Murray said the plan matched its $975 billion in revenue increases with cuts and interest savings of equal size. But Republicans said it did not, since it reversed $1 trillion in across-the-board cuts but did not count that against their spending cuts.

Those differences did not lend themselves to much optimism about the coming budget negotiations. “The only good news is that the fiscal path the Democrats laid out in their budget resolution won’t become law,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader.

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In Shift, Lobbyists Look for Bipartisan Support to Repeal a Tax

Cook executives had backed Representative Bobby Schilling, her Republican opponent in last year’s election for Illinois’s 17th District seat, after he had joined with other House Republicans to push for the repeal of a new medical device tax imposed to pay for President Obama’s health care law. The company said the tax would cut its profits this year by an estimated $15 million, perhaps limiting future expansions. But in a hint of a shift in corporate lobbying strategy now under way in Washington, the industry pitch is now focused on Democrats like Ms. Bustos.

“Republican or Democrat, we need them to understand who we are and what we do,” said Steve Ferguson, the chairman of Cook’s parent company, who was there alongside Ms. Bustos as she toured his company plant. The visit ended with Ms. Bustos telling local reporters she would consider joining the effort to repeal the tax, which is expected to raise $29 billion over 10 years.

“If current laws are holding businesses back from hiring locally, I’m open to looking into ways to improve and fix them,” Ms. Bustos said in a statement.

Just last year, with Republicans still within reach of taking over the Senate and White House, many companies were willing to burn a chunk of their corporate lobbying budget to push House Republicans to pass bills that everyone on Capitol Hill knew had no chance of ever becoming law. The muscle flexing at least made a political point — and potentially set up special-interest groups, like the medical device industry, for a successful push this year, assuming their hoped-for Republican victories had been scored.

But then the 2012 election took place. Candidates like Mr. Schilling were defeated, even though Cook executives had contributed generously to his re-election effort, to try to keep Ms. Bustos, a strong advocate of the Obama health care plan, out of office.

Now, lobbyists across the city are redoubling their efforts to build bipartisan coalitions — not just on the 2.3 percent medical device excise tax, but other hot topics, like the possible rewriting of corporate tax laws and revisions to the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act that revamped the way financial corporations are regulated.

Republicans still get the bulk of the money that the medical device industry contributes. But there are some key Democrats who are pulling in large amounts of industry financial support, like Senators Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, who have been outspoken in their opposition to the medical device tax.

Bipartisanship, of course, is not unheard of in Washington, and the lobbyists and corporate players who have intensified their bipartisan push this year credit their dedication to good governance. But much of this is about figuring out a way to get the legislative train running again — so they can deliver some rewards to their clients.

“Lobbing grenades back and forth — that is not good enough,” said Don Nickles, a former Republican senator from Oklahoma, who runs a lobbying firm whose client roster includes Medtronic, one of the nation’s top medical device companies.

It remains unclear whether the strategy will work. The animosity between Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill — and between the White House and Republican leaders — might be so intense that even this lobbying push will fail.

But this is the moment to try, lobbyists in Washington are telling their clients. The first two years of any presidential term are when Congress, at least by historical precedent, is typically more productive — before the political posturing for the next election takes over.

“It is no longer just about sending signals or messages,” said L. F. Payne Jr., a former House Democrat whose lobbying firm was hired by Cook Medical’s parent company last year to help its push to appeal to Democrats. “But it is time to actually pass some laws.”

The bid to repeal the medical device tax is a prime example of this shift in lobbying tactics. Last year in the Senate, the industry effort was led by Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, who secured the support of 33 other senators, all of them of his party. A House version pushing the tax repeal passed in June largely with Republican support. But the measure died, after it failed to come to a vote in the Senate.

This year, Mr. Hatch is again sponsoring a repeal bill, but he has four Democrats as co-sponsors, including liberals like Senator Al Franken of Minnesota.

Perhaps even more important, industry lobbyists helped circulate a letter among Senate Democrats in December, after the election, criticizing the tax and urging a delay in its Jan. 1 establishment. Sixteen sitting Democratic senators and two who had just been elected ultimately signed on. It was a real coup for the industry, as the letter included top Senate Democrats like Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Charles E. Schumer of New York.

The behind-the-scenes story of how those signatures were secured offers a window into the changing lobbying tactics. Companies like Cook Medical have seen their lobbying budgets soar, as they have beefed up their representation by lobbying firms with Democratic credentials, like the firm where Mr. Payne works, McGuire Woods, which also has former Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, as a lawyer on its team.

The appeal has included dozens of telephone calls from executives at medical device companies to the Senate Democrats or their staff, as well as many meetings in person on Capitol Hill.

Trade associations like the Advanced Medical Technology Association, have organized rallylike events in different states, and “fly-ins” to Washington, in which employees of medical equipment firms make it clear that they expect the help of their local members of Congress.

Donations from industry executives to certain important Democratic allies, like Ms. Klobuchar of Minnesota and Mr. Casey of Pennsylvania, surged in the last election cycle as the industry played a significant role in their re-election efforts.

Ms. Klobuchar, whose state has an estimated 400 medical device companies employing about 35,000 people, has emerged as one of the industry’s most important allies — cornering other Democrats on the Senate floor to press them to join the push, industry lobbyists said. The first real test will come this week. Senate backers of the device tax repeal, like Mr. Hatch and Ms. Klobuchar, plan to propose a nonbinding amendment to a federal budget bill to make their bipartisan opposition to the tax clear.

The industry executives and the lawmakers involved have at least so far avoided identifying how they would pay for the repeal of the device tax. They realize that they would only draw opposition from lobbyists representing whatever industry it is that would be targeted to make up the money. The biggest obstacle remains the White House, which last year threatened to veto the House medical tax repeal bill. The White House argues that demand for new devices will offset the economic impact of the tax.

But the industry, which sells devices ranging from wooden tongue depressors to pacemakers, has important Democratic allies now trying to squeeze the White House as well. Ms. Klobuchar and Mr. Franken brought up the topic last month with Mr. Obama during a ride they took with him on Air Force One.

“I think that there has been some renewed understanding on the president’s part,” Mr. Franken told the editorial board of a Minnesota newspaper last month — which then repeated his call for the repeal of the tax, under a headline, “If a tax has bipartisan opposition, Obama should listen.”

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Cuomo Drafts Communications Director From Attorney General’s Staff

Filling a key vacancy in his inner circle, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Friday named one of Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman’s top aides to serve as his new communications director.

The aide, Melissa DeRosa, is Mr. Schneiderman’s acting chief of staff. She will start her new position on April 1 and succeed Allison Gollust, who recently left the governor’s office after only a few months to reunite with her former boss, the television executive Jeffrey Zucker, at CNN.

Ms. DeRosa, 30, is well known in Albany. She first worked in politics as an intern for the political director of the New York State A.F.L.-C.I.O. when she was 16; before joining Mr. Schneiderman’s office in 2011 as deputy chief of staff, she was the New York State director for Organizing for America, a group formed by President Obama’s election campaign to build grass-roots support. She was also the director of communications and legislation for Cordo and Company, an Albany lobbying firm.

“I have known and respected Melissa for many years,” Mr. Cuomo said in a statement, “and believe her experience, character and intellect will be an invaluable asset as she leads our communications effort.”

In a memorandum to his staff, Mr. Schneiderman, who like Mr. Cuomo is a Democrat, described Ms. DeRosa as “a critical member of a talented team leading our office’s intergovernmental affairs, legislative agenda and communication efforts.” He said, “With her talent, insight and energy, Melissa will be missed.”

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GOP: Voter maps aided Democrats

Republicans trying to discredit Arizona's current legislative-district map told a federal court Monday that the new political lines were drawn deliberately to benefit Democrats and dilute the power of GOP voters.

Monday's session kicked off a weeklong hearing before a panel of three federal judges who must decide if the new map was skewed so heavily that it unconstitutionally denied Republicans their right to equal protection under the law.

At stake is whether the new boundary lines, which were used in the 2012 election, will hold or whether the panel will send the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission back to the drawing board.

On Monday, attorney David Cantelme laid out his case that everything from the way the five-member commission picked its attorneys to the way it set about drawing 30 new legislative districts was designed to benefit Democrats.

And he suggested the commission had access to incumbent politicians' home addresses, which showed up in a computer file of the commission, although it later could not be found.

Access to such data, and using it to create a legislative map, would be a big "no-no," Cantelme observed as he questioned Commissioner Richard Stertz.

Stertz, a Tucson Republican appointed to the panel by then-Senate President Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, agreed it would be improper but said he had no knowledge of such a file.

The commission consists of two Republicans, two Democrats and a registered independent, who serves as chairman.

Through his questioning of Stertz, Cantelme established that the commission quickly split along partisan lines, with Chairwoman Colleen Mathis voting with the Democrats on the commission's more pivotal issues.

Cantelme zeroed in on the changes made to the commission's 10 "majority minority" districts, which were key to ensuring that the Arizona map would meet the criteria of the federal Voting Rights Act. The U.S. Department of Justice must preclear any changes to election law in Arizona to ensure the ability of minorities to elect a candidate of their choosing is not diminished.

Once it was clear the 10 districts would likely pass Voting Rights muster, Cantelme said, the commission continued to adjust the lines and in most cases reduced the number of minority voters in those areas while still keeping them at levels that would help boost Democratic candidates.

That, Cantelme argued, allowed the commission to "pack" Republican voters into a smaller number of districts while relying on a combination of minority voters and non-minority Democrats to dominate more districts than they otherwise should have. However, Stertz testified that he had complained that the commission was "hyperpacking" districts with Democrats.

After the commission completed its work in early 2012, it was widely believed that Republicans could stake claim to 16 or 17 of the 30 districts and Democrats to 10, with the remainder being competitive.

After the 2012 election, Democrats gained seats, ending the GOP's supermajority. The Senate has 17 Republicans and 13 Democrats, while the House is split 36-24.

A handful of Republican voters, including the wife of Senate President Andy Biggs, R-Gilbert, filed the lawsuit last year challenging the new boundaries.

Today, the court will hear from a state Democratic Party official who closely followed the redistricting process. Cantelme is expected to grill the official, D.J. Quinlan, over an e-mail he received from then-state Rep. Richard Miranda, D-Phoenix, outlining four districts that would favor minority candidates.

Quinlan forwarded the information to Democratic Commissioner Linda McNulty, and court filings have suggested that this might be evidence of a Democratic conspiracy.

The e-mail outlined the preferences of the Arizona Redistricting Minority Coalition for four minority-dominated districts. Other groups also submitted their own versions of legislative maps, which the commission welcomed.

Stertz testified that the four districts were "untouchable" as the map was being drawn.

Commission attorneys, who had just begun their cross-examination of Stertz late Monday and have yet to call their own witnesses, have said the plaintiffs' arguments are thin at best.

"In the end, plaintiffs can only point to the pattern that the Republican plurality districts are generally slightly overpopulated and Democratic plurality districts are slightly underpopulated, but that alone is not evidence of partisan bias," commission attorneys wrote.

Copyright 2012 The Arizona Republic|azcentral.com. All rights reserved.For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

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Obama Faces Political Risks in Emphasizing Effects of Spending Cuts

But as president, Mr. Obama is charged with minimizing the damage from the spending reductions and must steer clear of talking down the economy. A sustained campaign against the cuts by the president could become what one former aide called “a self-fulfilling kind of mess.”

As a result, Mr. Obama is carefully navigating between maximizing heat on Republicans to undo the cuts while mobilizing efforts to make sure that the steep spending cuts do not hurt Americans. His advisers acknowledge the potential political perils ahead as the president struggles to find the right kind of balance.

At his first cabinet meeting of his second term on Monday, Mr. Obama called the cuts an “area of deep concern” that would slow the country’s growth, but promised to “manage through it” while pursuing a robust agenda. It was an echo of his formulations from the White House podium on Friday, when he began to dial back the dire warnings about long lines at airports and furloughs of F.B.I. agents, to name a couple, that he had made over the past several weeks.

“I’ve instructed not just my White House but every agency to make sure that regardless of some of the challenges that they may face because of sequestration, we’re not going to stop working on behalf of the American people,” Mr. Obama said, using the formal name for the spending cuts.

The president’s approach is unlikely to satisfy Mr. Obama’s most partisan backers, who view blaming Republicans for the deep spending cuts — especially in the military — as a tantalizing opportunity for political gain. And stepping back from a battle over the cuts could allow the significantly lower spending to become the “new normal” for the federal budget.

But a high-profile focus on the cuts in the months ahead is risky, too.

If severe economic pain ultimately fails to materialize, Mr. Obama could be blamed for hyping the situation, much like his cabinet secretaries were in recent weeks. (Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, for example, was criticized for declaring the nation would be “less safe” because of furloughs of border patrol agents.)

Seeking short-term political gain with the spending cuts could also make more difficult the president’s hopes for a longer-term budget deal with Republicans on taxes and entitlement spending.

Mr. Obama’s team is keenly aware that the more he focuses on the cuts, the more he threatens to divert attention from his second-term priorities on guns, immigration and preschool.

“You can’t simply put them on hold and simply deal with this,” David Axelrod, a former top adviser to Mr. Obama, said in an interview. The danger of sounding the alarm on the sequester, he said, is that “you can so magnify the impact of it so that it becomes an even bigger self-fulfilling kind of mess.”

Mr. Obama was careful during his first term to seize on any bit of good economic news so that no one could accuse him of hurting the economy by his statements. That desire to be upbeat — as in 2010, when administration officials declared a “recovery summer” just before the economy dipped again — sometimes got him into trouble.

The question now for the president is how much to keep up the drumbeat of concern about the spending cuts in the weeks ahead.

In talking points distributed by the White House to Democratic pundits on Friday, advisers suggested focusing on how Republican refusal to accept tax increases will “threaten our national security and hundreds of thousands of middle-class jobs and our entire economy while too many Americans are still looking for work.”

But the document also urges them to make the point that it is time to turn to other issues. Former Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Democratic leader during the Clinton years and the first term of George W. Bush, said he expects the president will not spend much time talking about the cuts.

“What he has to do is say, ‘I warned you about this, it’s going to happen, it’s gradual, but at the same time, we’ve got a country to run,’ ” Mr. Daschle said. “You’re not going to hear him with much more hyperbolic rhetoric.”

Senior White House aides said as much on Friday before Mr. Obama formally signed the order putting the cuts into effect. They told reporters that sequestration cuts would not be the only thing the president talks about — or even the majority of what he talks about — in the weeks ahead.

But they said he will try to score a political point when opportunities arise.

Aides continue to bet that they will. Even without Mr. Obama’s intervention, White House officials said they expect the effect of the cuts will slowly become more visible.

Government workers will begin forced furloughs in April, air control towers in small towns will eventually close and a lack of overtime for airport security officers will make lines longer over time.

“This is a slow-roll disaster instead of a meteor hitting,” said Matt Bennett, a Clinton-era adviser and the vice president for communications at Third Way, a liberal research group. “It’s coming on slowly. You are going to see it popping up.”

But it’s also possible that the severe angst is limited to relatively small communities of interest: federal workers, defense contractors, service providers who depend on government grants. If that happens, Mr. Obama would have little leverage to use against Republicans.

“It’s imperative not to lose sight of the rest of the agenda,” said Jim Manley, a former top aide to Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader. “They are smart enough to realize it’s a delicate balancing act.”

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2 Conflicting Legislative Agendas Arise From Gun Safety Task Force in Connecticut

Democrats called for an expansion of Connecticut’s assault-weapons ban that would cover a broader array of weapons, ban their sale and make it a felony to possess an assault weapon without applying for a certificate of possession from the state. Democrats also called for a ban on large-capacity magazines holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition.

Republicans joined Democrats in calling for universal background checks, expanded safe-storage requirements, added requirements to buy ammunition and other measures. They cited 16 areas of agreement. Still, Democrats and Republicans ended up with sharply differing agendas on the most contentious issues, which leaders of the Democratic-controlled General Assembly must now address. The six leaders of the two houses aim to draw up legislation perhaps within the next week.

Democratic and Republican leaders of the gun-violence subcommittee of the Legislature’s Bipartisan Task Force on Gun Violence Prevention and Children’s Safety Tuesday said gun legislation had proved extraordinarily complex and contentious, given a historic outpouring of responses from opponents and supporters of new gun-control measures.

“My experience, having been in the Legislature for 32 years, is the level of broad-based interest in this subject is unprecedented,” said State Senator Martin Looney, co-chairman of the guns subcommittee. He said the volume of contact from residents and the galvanization of public interest was “extraordinary.”

But it was clear that bipartisanship had its limits.

Republicans hailed the committee’s “comprehensive approach to gun safety,” which they said would close loopholes in current law and restrict who can legally possess specific weapons.

But they said that partisan differences remained. Speaking for Republicans on the subcommittee, Representative Craig Miner, co-chairman of the guns subcommittee, said: “We believe it’s not the gun that kills the person. It’s the person that actually kills the person. That sounds kind of cold, but that’s the way it is.”

Gun-control advocates said that it was now up to the Democratic majority, acting in concert with a strong antigun agenda from Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, to act decisively in response to the Dec. 14 shootings that left 26 children and educators dead.

“For Republicans to think that is a response to Sandy Hook is just outrageous,” said Betty Gallo, a lobbyist for gun-control groups, adding that she didn’t understand why, almost three months since the shooting, “the Republican members of the task force brought forward a proposal that doesn’t address the enormity of what happened.”

The lack of consensus in the committee came as Democrats have become increasingly frustrated by the deliberativeness of the process while other states, including New York, have passed major gun legislation. On Feb. 21, Governor Malloy announced an aggressive agenda similar to what emerged from Democrats on the committee.

Last week, Senator Looney and the Senate president pro tempore, Donald Williams, both Democrats, urged action by March 13 — the next day, March 14, will signify the third month since the day of the shootings.

In a letter to colleagues, they wrote: “Other states — New York, Colorado and Maryland — have taken action since the Newtown tragedy. In Connecticut, we must not bow to pressure from those who would delay action as a way of blocking common-sense reforms.”

But Mr. Miner said there was no virtue in moving forward too quickly and added that the response to the New York legislation should serve as a warning to legislators in Connecticut.

“I don’t consider the time to be an issue,” Mr. Miner said. “If you look at some of the laws that have been passed already by our neighbors, some of the recommendations they are trying to recover from. Did they really finish their job when they passed the first bill? I would suggest they didn’t.”

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The Twin in the Background Takes Center Stage

He may need new material.

Mr. Castro, 38, is accustomed to being mistaken for his one-minute-older identical twin, Julián Castro, a rising political star who last summer became the first Latino to deliver a keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. In the two months since Mr. Castro, a lawyer and former state legislator, was sworn into Congress, he has been the twin receiving the larger share of attention.

He received high-profile assignments to the Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees and was elected president of the House Democrats’ freshman class. Although his own Congressional race was noncompetitive, he made fast friends and earned praise from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee for raising cash for future colleagues.

And he has been an unofficial ambassador on immigration for the Obama administration, appearing on “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” on ABC the morning after the White House’s comprehensive immigration plan leaked. There he lauded the president’s efforts and highlighted what he called “commonalities” between the administration’s proposal and one by a bipartisan group of senators.

“I’m trying to very quickly be as helpful as I can,” Mr. Castro said last week in an interview, “not only as a voice out there speaking about it in the news, but also internally, in the body.”

Business Insider named Mr. Castro one of its “12 most fascinating new members” of Congress. And a study by the University of Minnesota Smart Politics project ranked him the second-most-talked-about House freshman in terms of news media coverage, edging out Steve Stockman, the Friendswood Republican who brought the Obama-bashing rocker Ted Nugent as a guest to the president’s State of the Union address.

While there has been much public discussion about the ambitions of his brother to become governor, speculation is already mounting that Joaquin Castro could challenge Ted Cruz, the state’s Tea Party-backed junior United States senator, in 2018.

“Certainly my brother being in the spotlight the way he was at the Democratic National Convention helped a lot in terms of exposing us to the nation,” Mr. Castro said. “That said, I think that you’ve got to do well when you have the opportunity or those opportunities will go away.”

Mr. Castro has embraced the limelight and is leveraging the attention in many ways. He claimed one of the highly visible aisle seats hours ahead of the State of the Union address and uses distinctive wordplay to drive home one of his main messages, that education breeds prosperity for the underprivileged. In interviews and public appearances on a recent day in Washington, Mr. Castro used a term he coined — America’s “infrastructure of opportunity” — no fewer than six times.

He has also become a serious student of domestic and international policy. The academic aspect is familiar territory for Mr. Castro, who with his brother attended Stanford University and Harvard Law School after being raised on the working-class west side of San Antonio by his mother, a political activist.

He has surrounded himself with experienced staff members: his chief of staff is a former aide to Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, and his press secretary served Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader.

In a 12-hour period last week, Mr. Castro jumped from a meeting on Islamic terrorists in Eurasia to a briefing on challenges to the Voting Rights Act and the Defense of Marriage Act. He gave his first one-minute speech on the House floor, on the effects of sequestration, approaching the dais minutes after Speaker John Boehner accused the president of playing politics. Afterward, Mr. Castro dashed across town to a forum on high school graduation and college readiness.

Mr. Castro said it was too early to speculate on his political future.

“A lot of folks feel like my brother and me or other politicians chart out their careers from Day 1 until the end. I’ve never been like that,” he said. “I just believe that if I work hard and do well, who knows what the future holds?”

But he did not resist taking a thinly veiled jab at Mr. Cruz, who has made headlines in the Senate for a prosecutorial-style questioning of Mr. Obama’s defense secretary nominee, Chuck Hagel.

“I didn’t come here to be a wallflower, but I didn’t come here to get into a shouting match with everybody I meet either,” Mr. Castro said. “Doing your job requires different modes, and you can’t just be stuck in one mode where you’re always the shrill outsider screaming at everybody.”

The Castro brothers’ political allies credit them with boosting the national profile of Texas Democrats. State Representative Rafael Anchia, Democrat of Dallas, said they had “in a very short period of time almost single-handedly breathed life back into the Texas Democratic Party.”

Ed Espinoza, an Austin-based Democratic consultant, said that among the rising Latino stars on both sides of the aisle, the Castros pose a big electoral threat. “I don’t think the G.O.P. has the answer for them,” Mr. Espinoza said.

The state’s Republicans say they are unmoved. Jordan Berry, a political consultant who was on Mr. Cruz’s campaign, attributed the attention paid to the brothers to a “ ‘Parent Trap’ effect,” referring to the movie about identical twins, and said he was “confident in our bench over theirs” in the race to connect with the state’s rapidly expanding Latino population.

Rob Johnson, a Republican operative who ran a “super PAC” in support of Mr. Cruz’s primary opponent, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, said party leaders were unworried.

“We recognize that they’re talented politicians and political operatives, but this is also Texas, the reddest of the red states,” he said. “What we need to focus on is not what the other side is doing and saying, but what we as a party are doing and saying to grow our numbers among Latinos.”

For his part, Mr. Anchia, the Democratic state representative, said he was happy to see Mr. Castro getting his due on the national stage. He said Mr. Castro had spent more time in the last few years working to get his brother elected mayor than on cultivating his own aspirations.

“He sacrificed himself for his brother’s success,” Mr. Anchia said. “For someone who is equally bright, talented and ambitious, that was an admirable trait.”

Mr. Castro said he was glad to play a supporting role and that he did not believe that he had lost out.

“Somebody jokingly asked me a few years ago, ‘Who’s going to be the Jack Kennedy and who’s the Robert Kennedy?’ ” Mr. Castro recalled. “I said, ‘I’m glad to play the Robert Kennedy.’ ”

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Deep Philosophical Divide Underlies the Impasse

That can be difficult through the fog of political war that has hung over this town. But a step back illuminates roots deeper than the prevailing notion that Washington politicians are simply fools acting for electoral advantage or partisan spite.

Republicans don’t seek to grind government to a halt. But they do aim to shrink its size by an amount currently beyond their institutional power in Washington, or popular support in the country, to achieve.

Democrats don’t seek to cripple the nation with debt. But they do aim to preserve existing government programs without the ability, so far, to set levels of taxation commensurate with their cost.

At bottom, it is the oldest philosophic battle of the American party system — pitting Democrats’ desire to use government to cushion market outcomes and equalize opportunity against Republicans’ desire to limit government and maximize individual liberty.

And they are fighting it within a 21st-century political infrastructure that impedes compromise.

Those government initiatives include Social Security from F.D.R.’s New Deal, Medicare and Medicaid from L.B.J.’s Great Society, and the 2010 national health care law. President Obama wants to keep them in roughly their current forms — even as the wave of baby boom retirements makes them costlier than ever.

His Republican opponents are the philosophic heirs of conservatives who opposed their creation in the first place. Beginning in 2009, they gained fresh momentum in the quest to roll them back.

While the Great Recession depressed tax revenues, the Wall Street bailout and stimulus bill gave Americans sticker shock; deficits topped $1 trillion annually. So in 2011, the newly elected Republican House began pushing President Obama backward in budget fights that forced significant slowing of federal spending and some significant spending cuts.

Their climactic showdown over the debt limit in 2011 damaged the nation’s credit rating. With both sides battered and exhausted, Republicans joined Democrats in seizing the so-called sequester as the means to end the impasse.

Then Mr. Obama stopped backing up — and moved to generate momentum of his own.

The right’s soft spot, as Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich learned amid the conservative ascendancy of the 1980s and early ’90s, is the popularity of expensive “entitlements” serving the elderly.

“Cut spending,” as a general invocation, is popular. “Cut spending for your mother’s Medicare” is not.

Mr. Obama used his re-election campaign to isolate and attack that vulnerability. Acknowledging the need for some entitlement cuts, he offered voters this budgetary choice: his smaller cuts combined with tax increases on affluent Americans, or the Republicans’ bigger ones without tax increases.

More Americans, as polls have repeatedly shown, prefer Mr. Obama’s approach. He won the election.

Now the president is trying to wield his public opinion advantage as a club to back Republicans down.

The budget cuts of 2011, like sequestration now, targeted smaller “discretionary” programs that don’t command the support Medicare and Social Security do. Mr. Obama argues, and some Republicans agree, that Washington has cut most of what it can from those.

He continues to advocate comparatively modest Medicare cuts focused on reimbursements to doctors and hospitals — more near-term cuts, in fact, than Republicans have been willing to specify. But at one high-profile event after another, in Washington and across the country, he accuses Republicans of preferring reduced benefits for old and vulnerable Americans over higher taxes on the affluent.

Opponents blast him for “campaigning” instead of governing. Yet those events have become his method of seeking outcomes that negotiations with Republican leaders haven’t produced.

It worked soon after the election when he forced Republicans to accept some tax increases in the “fiscal cliff” deal. It worked again when Republicans declined to fight anew over the debt limit until May, at the earliest.

That doesn’t mean it will work again by making Republicans accept a second tax increase.

Over the last generation, polarization has melted away the alloy that once narrowed differences between Republicans and Democrats, leaving both as masses of near-pure ideological ore.

The Republican rank-and-file is purer — more conservative than the Democratic rank-and-file is liberal.

Resisting tax increases is a matter of such deep conviction that some senior Republicans believe House colleagues would fire John A. Boehner as House speaker for conceding to Mr. Obama again. For less ideological Republicans, the partisan composition of their districts and states can make following national opinion riskier (against a more conservative primary challenger) than defying it (against a Democratic general-election foe).

The difficulty of winning a second tax increase may ultimately make the president regret the fiscal-cliff deal, which brought only half the new revenue he considers necessary.

For now, he seeks to grind down his opposition as the impact of sequestration mounts for air travelers, education programs and the Pentagon. Against Republicans’ solid edge on the issue of spending restraint (in this week’s NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll), he wields wide Democratic advantages on helping the middle class and protecting Medicare, and a narrow one on handling taxes.

The survey showed 50 percent of Americans approve of Mr. Obama’s job performance. Only 29 percent expressed a positive view of the Republican Party.

Among demographic groups, the only one viewing Mr. Boehner’s party more positively than negatively was white Southerners (by just 39 percent to 35 percent at that). More than twice as many Americans credited Mr. Obama, as compared with Republicans, with emphasizing themes of bipartisan unity.

Even if numbers like those don’t threaten the House Republican majority in 2014, they alarm party strategists who’ve watched their nominees lose the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections. Mr. Obama’s hope: the fact that Congressional Republicans are insulated from national opinion doesn’t make them impervious to it.

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The Payoff in Delaying Retirement

“It’s a disaster, but a slow rolling one,” said Jared Bernstein, former chief economic adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

N. Gregory Mankiw, the former chief economic adviser to President George W. Bush, wouldn’t disagree. “Other than being precisely the opposite of the kind of fiscal changes we need, what’s not to like?” he told me, with more than a touch of irony.

Yet despite the broad criticism, what the impasse between Democrats and Republicans just did to the federal budget is not at all atypical. It follows to the letter the most ironclad rule of American politics, which has held sway for the last three decades: spare the old.

The impasse was portrayed as a doomsday machine that went off unexpectedly — the consequence of an intractable divide in Washington over taxes and spending. It led to the so-called sequester, the product of a longstanding bipartisan reluctance to tinker with the social safety net erected to maintain the living standards of the elderly. Why? Because the old vote at much higher rates than the young.

It’s true that Republicans have offered plans to limit spending on Medicare and Social Security by turning them into voucher-type programs, letting seniors buy their own health insurance with a set amount of money and manage their own pensions. But they never dared pay the political cost of turning these ideas into law even when they controlled Congress and the White House.

Democrats, meanwhile, have been reluctant to put up an all-out fight for the large tax increases needed to pay for the expanding entitlement programs demanded by an aging population, without any cuts. Usually champions of progressivity, they have nonetheless resisted proposals to direct benefits for the elderly more specifically to low and middle income Americans.

This fixation on defending entrenched positions is getting us nowhere. The problem — a growing cohort of retirees, born during the baby boom, now claiming Social Security and Medicare — is only getting bigger.

But what if there were a way for the government to ease the strain that the aging place on the budget while actually increasing their income in retirement, at little or no cost to their benefits? A well-designed reform would even improve the nation’s rate of economic growth. The way to do it is simply to encourage older workers to spend a larger share of their increasing life spans in the work force.

Reform along this line might even garner bipartisan support. But it requires Democrats and Republicans to overcome their fear of disturbing the old.

Spending on Medicare, Social Security’s old age pensions and retirement programs for civilians and military on the federal payroll will hit almost 9 percent of the nation’s total economic output by 2023, according to baseline projections by the Congressional Budget Office. It will consume about 38 percent of the federal government’s entire budget, up from 25 percent four decades ago, according to the Office of Management and Budget.

Meanwhile, the C.B.O. expects the discretionary part of the budget — which includes every program requiring annual appropriations, from the budgets of the Pentagon and the National Science Foundation to worker training programs and early childhood education — will shrink to its smallest share of the economy since the Eisenhower administration. Forty years ago discretionary programs, including much of the spending aimed at improving the economy for future generations, consumed more than half of the budget. In 10 years they will consume less than a quarter.

Senior citizens, to be sure, merit protection. Social insurance to keep retirees from dropping out of work and into poverty is as necessary today as when President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act in 1935. But an income support system meant for a society where people retired in their late 60s and died in their late 70s is under strain as Americans take to retiring earlier and living well into their 80s and beyond.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 7, 2013

The Economic Scene column on Wednesday, about the benefits of encouraging workers to delay retirement, misidentified a science organization that receives an annual appropriation from Congress. It is the National Science Foundation, not the National Academy of Sciences.

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Massachusetts Primary Battles Heat Up

Two Democratic congressmen will square off in the April 30 primary; Republicans have a three-way race. The winners will face each other in a special election scheduled for June 25.

All five candidates submitted at least 10,000 signatures on Wednesday to earn a spot on their respective primary ballots. The signatures still have to be verified, but the field is almost certainly set.

The surprise entry on the Republican side was Michael J. Sullivan, a former United States attorney and former acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. He managed to collect more than 23,000 signatures in 12 days without the aid of hired hands, which he called a “groundswell of support” for his candidacy.

The two other Republicans are State Representative Daniel B. Winslow and Gabriel E. Gomez, a businessman and former member of the Navy SEALs, both of whom used paid workers to help gather the requisite signatures.

The Republicans had to scramble for signatures in a brief time frame, made all the more narrow by the announcement just four weeks ago by former Senator Scott P. Brown that he would not seek the seat. Mr. Brown would have had no competition in a primary. Until he bowed out, the field was frozen.

The Democratic primary has been set for some time. A lengthy list of possible candidates — including the actor Ben Affleck and Edward M. Kennedy Jr. — evaporated after Representative Edward J. Markey, the liberal dean of the Massachusetts Congressional delegation, indicated early on that he would run. The Democratic establishment quickly coalesced around Mr. Markey in an attempt to stave off challengers who could drain the party of money and resources in a primary.

But Representative Stephen F. Lynch, a former ironworker who is the most conservative member of the delegation, entered the race anyway, and has been whipping up support among the unions. He and Mr. Markey have agreed to a series of six debates in the roughly 10 weeks before the primary.

If Mr. Markey wins, it seems likely that he will prevail in June, if only because Massachusetts is so heavily Democratic. Mr. Markey supports abortion rights and same-sex marriage and has sought action to stop global warming.

If Mr. Lynch is the winner, the political calculus will change. Some of this positions — he opposed President Obama’s health care plan and has been against abortion rights — put him out of sync with many in his party. Since entering the race, he has softened his stance against abortion but still calls himself “pro-life.” At one time he opposed gay marriage but changed his view many years ago. He supports a ban on assault weapons; he said he voted against such a ban in Massachusetts once several years ago because it was too weak, which reflected the view of the gun lobby, but he supported the federal ban.

“If Lynch wins the primary, it gets dicier” for the Democrats to win the general election, said Jeffrey M. Berry, a political scientist at Tufts University. “Some Democrats might sit it out.”

All three Republican contenders are starting out as relatively obscure and underfunded, Mr. Berry noted. He said they would have to spend money to raise their profiles in the primary, which could leave them short of cash by June.

Mr. Sullivan opposes abortion rights and same-sex marriage; Mr. Winslow could have more appeal to Democrats since he supports both. Mr. Gomez has yet to articulate his positions on numerous issues.

While the Democratic National Committee is backing Mr. Markey, the Republican National Committee has not committed to backing the Republican nominee.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 1, 2013

An article on Thursday about a primary election in Massachusetts for the Senate seat relinquished by John Kerry misstated the timing of a decision by Representative Stephen F. Lynch, one of the Democratic contenders, to drop his opposition to same-sex marriage. He changed his position several years ago; he has not done so “since entering the race.” The article also overstated the degree to which Mr. Lynch has altered his positions since deciding to run. He has shifted on one — not “some” — issues. (He has softened his opposition to abortion, though he still calls himself “pro-life.”)

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Minority senators raise alarm on elections-linked bills

A trio of racially diverse state senators on Monday condemned elections-related bills that they say discriminate against minorities and called on the U.S. Department of Justice to monitor the legislation.

Of particular concern to the senators are Senate Bill 1003, which would limit who can return a voter's ballot, and SB 1261, which would drop people from the early voting list if they failed to mail in their ballots and instead voted at the polls. Both passed the Senate last week.

"It would truly throw up obstacles to the early-vote process," Senate Minority Leader Leah Landrum Taylor said of SB 1261. She is African-American.

She was joined by Sens. Jack Jackson Jr., a Navajo, and Steve Gallardo, who is Latino. All three are Democrats, and all three said the bills would have a "devastating" impact on minority voting.

Gallardo said the legislation is a great example of why Arizona still needs to be under the protection of the federal Voting Rights Act, which was passed to protect minority voting rights and just last week was the topic of a U.S. Supreme Court case.

"The potential effect of these bills is alarming, and the genesis of these bills is equally concerning," the senators wrote.

None of the groups that have worked to increase minority voting was invited to the meetings where the bill language was crafted, Gallardo said. Although the bills have the backing of the state's 15 county elections officials, Gallardo said, those officials need to look outside their offices and consider the effect on voters.

Sen. Michele Reagan, R-Scottsdale, introduced the bills and made changes in response to concerns raised at public hearings last month. SB 1003 originally said only an immediate family member or roommate could drop a person's ballot at the polls, but she changed it to allow the voter to designate someone to do so, requiring signed statements from both the voter and the person delivering the ballot.

But the bill prevents any member of a political committee, political party or group or organization -- such as those that mobilized Latino voters last fall -- from delivering people's ballots. However, it exempts candidates and their spouses, who could continue to collect ballots and deliver them to elections officials.

Anyone violating the return procedures would be guilty of a Class 6 felony.

Democratic Party officials said it's common for voters to drop off their ballots at party headquarters, because they are wary of the U.S. Postal Service. Last November, 600 to 700 voters did so, party spokesman Frank Camacho said.

The state Republican Party said it doesn't get such requests, but Maricopa County GOP Chairman A.J. LaFaro said it has happened on the county level. However, he said, party officials support SB 1003 and would adjust.

The senators also complained about another bill that would have required anyone who received an early ballot to return it a week before election day. That measure, SB 1274, was held in the Senate Elections Committee and has not advanced. The other two bills are awaiting action in the House.

Copyright 2012 The Arizona Republic|azcentral.com. All rights reserved.For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

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Critics assail reform plans for elections

Election 2012 -- with its surge of Latino voters, increase in impossible-to-track campaign donations, and hotly fought ballot measures -- is reverberating at the Legislature in a flurry of bills that seek to remedy the problems exposed by last fall's contests.

THE BILLS

Bills proposed to address the problems that occurred during the November general election would do the following:

Pare down early-voting lists.

Make it more difficult to deliver other people's ballots to polling places.

Make it more difficult to place citizen initiatives on the ballot.

But many of the bills, including three approved in the Senate last week, could backfire. County elections officials promoted much of the legislation in the name of trying to avoid a repeat of last fall's issues, when a flurry of provisional ballots caused final results to be delayed for more than a week. Many voters were forced to file provisional ballots because their names appeared on early-voting lists.

But new restrictions could alienate voters and lead to further confusion, if not lawsuits, critics argue.

One bill would pare down early-voting lists; another would make it more difficult to deliver other people's ballots to polling places; and other bills would make it more difficult to place citizen initiatives on the ballot.

The loudest complaints have come from Arizona's Latinos, who led aggressive voter-registration drives that added thousands of new voters to the rolls. Those voters tend to cast their ballots overwhelmingly for Democrats.

Others have criticized the double standard that would be created for petition-signature requirements: strict compliance for citizen-driven initiatives, but a looser standard for candidates.

"We should be working on encouraging folks to participate in our elections, not taking that right away," said Sen. Steve Gallardo, D-Phoenix, who has led the charge against bills that would tighten rules for Arizona's popular early-ballot program.

Sam Wercinski, executive director of the Arizona Advocacy Network, said the bills are not so much a reaction to the 2012 election as to the protests sparked by the two-week wait for results.

"We've always had large numbers of provisionals," said Wercinski, whose group lobbies for voting access. "I think politicians saw how powerful the permanent early-voting list and vote-by-mail are for new voters, and particularly Latino voters, and that's why we have all these bills."

Even elections officials, who would have to enforce whatever changes the Legislature approves, say the best solution to confusion over early voting is increased voter education. However, there is no money in the current bills to provide for greater voter outreach.

Lee Rowland, an attorney at the New York-based Brennan Center for Justice, said Arizona is not alone in reacting to last fall's elections with a stream of proposed changes.

There was an "unprecedented level of restriction" in the 2012 election, she said, such as the refusal of Florida Gov. Rick Scott to extend early-voting hours to deal with long lines and confusion in Pennsylvania over a new voter-identification law.

"It's really important that the focus be on actual problems, not manufactured problems," Rowland said. "What we really shouldn't see is a return to some of the restrictive practices that happened before the election."

To hear the backers of some of the key bills at the Capitol, Arizona's laws weren't restrictive enough. From trying to rein in who can return a voter's ballot to how much scrutiny should be given to voter signatures on petitions, the bills seek to tighten the rules.

Early-vote troubles

Many of those provisional ballots that caused problems in last fall's election came from voters who had signed up on the permanent early-voting list and received a ballot in the mail. But on Election Day, for any number of reasons, people who received an early ballot walked into a polling place and either dropped it off or asked for a ballot. Those who got a new ballot had to vote provisionally so elections workers could verify that they had not voted twice. That process added time to the tabulation process.

It's not a phenomenon unique to 2012: Ever since Arizona created the early-voting list, late-arriving "early" ballots have slowed elections returns.

Senate Bill 1261 would thin out the permanent early-voting list by automatically removing any voter who does not vote by mail for two consecutive election cycles.

The clock would start ticking with the 2010 election, meaning voters who didn't cast an early ballot in 2010 and 2012 would be purged. They could still vote, but would have to do it the old-fashioned way by going to the polls.

The Arizona Voters Coalition doesn't like the automatic nature of the purge. Rather, this collection of civic groups said, the state should let voters opt out of the list. Coalition members include the League of Women Voters of Arizona, the Inter-Tribal Council and Mi Familia Vota.

The group also objected to the bill's original penalty of imposing a Class 5 felony, punishable by up to 11/2 years in prison, on anyone who knowingly altered a voter-registration form without consent of that voter. Sen. Michele Reagan, R-Scottsdale and the sponsor of SB 1261, reduced the penalty to a Class 6 felony, which often is bargained down to a misdemeanor.

The Senate approved the amended bill last week on a party-line 16-12 vote, with Democrats opposed. It's now in the House.

The state Democratic Party assailed Reagan over the bill, as well as two others approved by the Senate, sending out a news release headlined "Help stop voter suppression in Arizona" and charging that the bills were part of her strategy to nail down the GOP nomination for secretary of state in 2014.

Reagan, who's been clear about her interest in the top elections post, said the bills come with the backing of county elections officials, both Democrats and Republicans. They resulted from study sessions last year that involved an array of people involved in the elections process who were trying to plug the holes plaguing the system.

However, she never invited the Latino organizing groups that mobilized thousands of new voters. They held a news conference, testified at the Elections Committee hearings Reagan chairs and, just last week, staged a silent protest that led to their ejection from a Senate hearing room. About a dozen young people held up small signs claiming Reagan was anti-Latino.

These grass-roots groups are particularly upset with another Reagan bill that would limit who can carry a voter's ballot into a polling place. It carries a Class 6 felony penalty. Currently, anyone, or any group, can take in ballots, a practice that Reagan last month said she found appalling.

SB 1003 would require anyone who delivers a ballot on behalf of a voter to sign a statement that they have the voter's permission to do so. It's a concession to critics of the original bill, which would have limited the practice to immediate family members or roommates.

Reagan questions whether protesters realize she's amended the bill to allow the voter to designate anyone they want to deliver the ballot. And she has set up meetings to discuss concerns with these groups, saying they had never asked before they launched their protests.

SB 1003 is a response to the practice of grass-roots groups that signed up thousands of Latino voters and then collected their ballots for delivery to the polls.

"A lot of people trust us more than the U.S. mail to take in their ballots," said Brendan Walsh, who worked on voter registration and turnout with Central Arizonans for a Sustainable Economy.

SB 1003 also passed the Senate on the same 16-12 party-line vote. Sen. Jack Jackson Jr., who represents the Navajo and Hopi tribal areas, said SB 1003 could have a "devastating" impact.

"Republicans want to make a felon out of someone helping their neighbors to vote, but many members of our tribal communities live in remote areas and depend on help to deliver their early ballots," Jackson, a Democrat, said in a statement.

Initiative reform

Last summer saw courtroom battles over two of Arizona's most contentious ballot initiatives: to dedicate a permanent sales-tax increase to education and to create an open-primary system. Both withstood their challenges but lost at the polls.

But the legal battles could have turned out differently if SB 1264, also sponsored by Reagan, had been in place. The Senate approved the bill 16-12.

Among the two dozen changes the bill proposes is one that would make "strict compliance" the standard for voter signatures on initiative petitions.

In the court challenge to the open-primary system, the judge relied on a "substantial compliance" standard that allowed certain voter signatures to be counted, although opponents argued they should be tossed.

Chris Herstam, an attorney and former state lawmaker, questioned why the Legislature is creating a tougher standard for voter-initiated measures while not imposing it on their own candidate campaigns.

"An obvious double standard exists by giving candidates the benefit of the doubt, but not citizens who wish to utilize their constitutional rights," said Herstam, who supported the open-primary system.

This provision of SB 1264 would "neuter" the 101-year-old citizen-initiative process, he said.

Jim Drake, staff attorney for the secretary of state, said the rules for candidate petitions are in a different statute and should be looked at separately.

Another provision of the bill would clarify that only a copy of a citizen initiative that is time- and date-stamped by the Secretary of State's Office would qualify as the official version.

Backers of the education sales tax relied on a version of their measure that had been submitted electronically when they circulated petition sheets. The courts upheld the education supporters, and the measure qualified for the ballot over the objection of opponents.

However, the ensuing campaigns on the education sales tax and the open primary were defeated largely because of an infusion of money from non-profit corporations that are not required to disclose their donors.

Reagan said she couldn't find a way to force those groups to disclose their donors, and the Senate last week defeated a Democratic amendment that was an attempt to put the disclosure burden on the recipient of the outside contributions.

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